It generally was not a day considered a good day. A lot was going through in my head, work-related, personal matters, children’s assignments, and my energy level were getting low. Physically, I felt drained, despite having a good meal, a cup of tea. Everything around me was the same, yet I had become reactive. I knew something was not right.
I was never taught at school on life management. What is life? How do we manage ourselves as people? We learned mathematics, science, language, Religion, Aesthetic subjects. Were we taught about feelings, emotions, decisions, and their impact on ourselves and others around us? We were taught, if you study hard, you will get a good job. We valued our education so much. We learned at school, and we went for extra tuition for some subjects we were not good at. We spent most of our lives studying, then studying for exams, redoing exams, planning to go to college, university, then spending additional years on an undergraduate degree, then Masters and then a Ph.D. What have we done on Life Management?
Have you thought, how much are we using what we have studied in your work or your personal life today? 70%? 80%? I am probably using <30% of what I had learned in school, undergraduate, and Masters’s programs. To get to use that 30%, how many years have I spent? Nearly a good 25 years of my life! How successful are we today? So what happened to us in life management skills? Where did we acquire this knowledge? From those around us and our own experiences. Did we ever think, even for a moment, the knowledge we got from others around us was the proper foundation for us to build our life? That our judgment and decisions we made were precisely right for us?
We are bad managers of life because we haven’t been taught Life Management. You have a machine without having the manual of operation. How about that? So you spend a great deal of life, almost ¾ that of a lifetime, playing games of errors, resurrecting, again playing, sometimes, just repeating what you were doing without any change. In our view, we look to others who we think as successful and wonder why they have done so well.
What are the basics we should add to our lives?
Get on top of the wheel to give instructions to the departments of your body
When your mind is not taking instructions from you, it is like a hap-hazard driving test. The wheel is being turned around in many directions, and of course, chances of you crashing onto something is high, with a lot of damage to follow. Know when you feel overwhelmed because you have ‘mind diarrhea’ and you are not at the top of the wheel. Turn this inability into the ability to manage your systems, put yourself right up the wheel, assume control over your being.
Get the perspective right
Whether it is someone who lives happy or unhappy, there are no differences physically or things they do when they wake up, during the day, and before going to sleep. The difference is created by how they look at their lives, actions and interpreting them. Find the proper context first, understanding and dissect the conditions, understand the trigger factors, understand how the environment has played a part in destabilizing your base. Then pick and pinpoint the issues you have reacted vehemently, understand why, and see their importance in your life course. Is it worthy of taking action, or would it pass off with time? And then act on it.
Understand stress is created by losing perspective
Sadguru, the greatest Yogi, Mystic, and Visionary attributes ‘Stress’ as a natural by-product of human beings, losing view of what this life is all about. He further explains the ‘psychological process,’ when stressed, would become far more prominent than the ‘existential process’ and points out this as the fundamental source of all suffering. While everything around you could be going well, just one wrong thought or emotion can make all the happy mood, the laughter, the living light, and the active phase disappear, like a drop of dew under a burst of morning sunshine. Know when this happened, identify why it happened, and quickly eliminate the weeds out of the garden. Keep the mind garden as clean and beautiful as you can, weed out any unnecessary thoughts and emotions before they plant into big trees taking unnecessary space.
Mind what enters as thoughts from outside in
Our mind at times looks like a dustbin to put everything that enters from outside to be parked in. Everyone passes something to you. We have limited knowledge of what to take and what to throw out. We get lost in the process. The space is filled, and suddenly we don’t know what we should consider and throw away. With time you start to identify lots of things with you; instead, if you can realize the difference between what is expected from you vs. trying to make these thoughts you, or counter-argue them from the angle of you as a person.
Stress is not showered from far above us but produced within ourselves
Understanding your life’s reality in today’s living world is paramount for you to set your goals, targets, etc. What you are capable of, the circumstances you operate in, your responsibilities, etc., is essential to know before planning things out. Otherwise, you will go round and round and will not move. That way, you will be generating stress as you come so hard to change yet finding it impossible to change because you didn’t consider your reality.
Learn to stay happy
Today, seeking happiness has become a goal for many. Many have forgotten what joy was. We have acquired wealth, experience, acquaintances, reproduced, yet we are far from happy. We keep longing for more. We go around getting more stress and blame conditions, people for our unhappiness. It is time we understand it is all internal. We have acted on how we have interpreted things by ourselves. The limitations we had put ourselves were internal. The beliefs we created about someone or circumstance were internal. The secret to happiness is to learn to appreciate and express it. The most beautiful moments in your life probably were when you were expressing joy, not when you were seeking it madly. Learn to find happiness in little things first and share it, and soon it will become a habit.
Transform from inside out
The quality of life is yours. It depends on how peaceful and joyful you are, how you can manage to stay happy. People whose basic needs are not met – food, water, clothing, shelter, and sleep, have reasons to be physically miserable in pursuit of them. But the needs of most others are not decided by what they have, but how they are at that moment, a collective bundle of your thoughts, comparisons, judgments, emotions, scales that you had imposed on yourself. Write in a paper the realities around you, your needs – essential and other, circumstances that generate stress, look for things you can stay happy about, accept what you have to and move on.
Wishing you the very best in the endeavor, from moving on to become a ‘right type’ of a manager yourself, crossing borders from a lousy one!
